China prioritized a New Socialist Countryside reform policy in 2005 to address the growing disparities in incomes and living standards between rural and urban populations. These policies are evaluated to provide a base line index of reform concerning farmer, agricultural, and rural economic...

What explains the spectacular increases in inequality of disposable income in transitional economies of Central and Eastern Europe? There are at least two possible explanations. First, the pre-tax distribution of income became more unequal because of the shift to a market economy. Second, the...

In this paper I give an account of development debates of the past two decades, focusing on the Washington Consensus and on the broader economic development discourse in historical context. Section 2 gives a basic account of the Washington consensus and how its meaning changed from the original...

By many estimates, the world has just crossed the point where more than half the world’s population is urban, a trend driven by rapid urbanization in developing countries. Urban centers offer economies of scale in terms of productive enterprise and public investment. Cities are social melting...

This paper introduces a significant new multi-disciplinary collection of studies of poverty dynamics, presenting the reader with the latest thinking by a group of researchers who are leaders in their respective disciplines. It argues that there are three main fronts on which progress must be...

In the last two decades, across a range of countries high growth rates have reduced poverty but have been accompanied by rising inequality. This paper is motivated by this stylized fact, and by the strong distributional concerns that persist among populations and policy makers alike, despite the...

China’s spectacular growth and poverty reduction has been accompanied by growing inequality which threatens the social compact and thus the political basis for economic growth and social development. The regional dimension of inequality— rural/urban, inland/coastal and provincial—dominates...